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It's the only one I've ever seen that really works. I use my quad core and can rip a movie in an hour.

Dvd goes on the shelf, mediacentre pc plays the file.

The movie industry is dumb. They have learned nothing. P.S. If I could go to a torrent site and have some machine at home build me a car... yer damn right I'd steal it in a heartbeat! Wait till 3d printers become affordable!

If only 3% of the 32 million did he'll make enough to live decently while working on the program.

BTW we have a somewhat modern version of the old shareware model in Giveaway Of The Day. The way it works for those that haven't tried it is each day a single different program is offered free and they give you this app for free, you can load it as many times on as many PCs as you own that day, and they usually offer along with it a chance to get a more powerful program or other offerings at a greatly reduced price.

Now I can say from experience this model works, as I have bought quite a few programs that I originally tried on Giveaway Of The Day like Astonshell which is great for older XP machines like my nettop and gives me useful gadgets like a CPU/RAM/Net throughput meter while using less resources than the default Winshell, or Paragon Drive Backup which is an awesome desktop and server imaging and backup program which I doubt I ever would have found without it being on GAOTD.

So you can still make good money with the shareware model today, you simply have to make a good and affordable product while more importantly getting it noticed. With GAOTD I can try apps easily without worrying about bugs and backdoors, and if I like it or need to add it to another machine later I can just buy a copy like I did with the above.

And Indie game designers? Giveaway Of The Day has a sister Game Giveaway on weekends and would be happy to offer it more often if they had more indie games, so you might want to contact them about getting your game featured. It is good exposure and if you offer at a fair price many of us WILL buy from you, just make it easy, make it affordable, and make it fast. Oh and NO PAYPAL as many of us will take one look at "Paypal only" and just walk away. There have been several programs I tried on GAOTD I wanted to buy and had my CC out but when I saw Paypal only I just closed the browser. No way I'm trusting my card to those crooks.

That is why I believe you and I benefited from Gates and Jobs with their singular vision and ability to get everyone on the same page. With FOSS you have 50 million guys reinventing the wheel (how many text editors are they up to now, 200?) and everyone "scratching their own itch" instead of working together as a cohesive unit. This leads to lost time and wasted efforts (how many distros are they up to now,500+?) and just makes a mess in the marketplace, ala what Apple had under Sculley with the Performa line, or Gates having to keep both Win9X and WinNT until he could merge the OS lines.

But sadly without real leadership and cohesive unity what you get is 50 million little fiefdoms and a HELL of a lot of zealotry. Too many here are of the "ZOMG M$ ZOMG!!" that it feels more and more like Boycott Novell instead of a place where we discuss the merits/demerits of the TECH, and no matter how many times you point out the numbers don't lie and something needs to change to draw the users you just get labeled a "paid shill" (I wish, where is my check Ballmer?) or astrorufer for pointing out the emperor has his Willie swinging in the breeze. If it was gonna sell it would have done so by now which is why I support what Shuttleworth is trying to do. He may fail but at least he isn't just repackaging the same shit and expecting people to "do it the Linux way" which has been shown time and time again to be a giant "DO NOT WANT" as far as customers goes.

BTW since you are a Mac guy you might want to check this out for one day only Paragon are giving away their excellent Windows/Macs interoperability tools on GAOTD. I have picked up several Paragon tools because of trying them on GAOTD and they really are top notch. These will give you read/write access between Windows and OSX at near native speed either way. Pretty cool and you can't beat free!

You're preachin' to the choir here, man!

I've been singing the same song for about 7 years here on /, And my voice is getting hoarse as hell...

I guess it will never change here: And in fact, entropy seems to be making the entire /. experience degrade non-gracefully over time. Sad, really.

Anyway, thanks for the link, and I will check that stuff out!

Because nothin' beats GOOD free software...

That is why I believe you and I benefited from Gates and Jobs with their singular vision and ability to get everyone on the same page. With FOSS you have 50 million guys reinventing the wheel (how many text editors are they up to now, 200?) and everyone "scratching their own itch" instead of working together as a cohesive unit. This leads to lost time and wasted efforts (how many distros are they up to now,500+?) and just makes a mess in the marketplace, ala what Apple had under Sculley with the Performa line, or Gates having to keep both Win9X and WinNT until he could merge the OS lines.

But sadly without real leadership and cohesive unity what you get is 50 million little fiefdoms and a HELL of a lot of zealotry. Too many here are of the "ZOMG M$ ZOMG!!" that it feels more and more like Boycott Novell instead of a place where we discuss the merits/demerits of the TECH, and no matter how many times you point out the numbers don't lie and something needs to change to draw the users you just get labeled a "paid shill" (I wish, where is my check Ballmer?) or astrorufer for pointing out the emperor has his Willie swinging in the breeze. If it was gonna sell it would have done so by now which is why I support what Shuttleworth is trying to do. He may fail but at least he isn't just repackaging the same shit and expecting people to "do it the Linux way" which has been shown time and time again to be a giant "DO NOT WANT" as far as customers goes.

BTW since you are a Mac guy you might want to check this out for one day only Paragon are giving away their excellent Windows/Macs interoperability tools on GAOTD. I have picked up several Paragon tools because of trying them on GAOTD and they really are top notch. These will give you read/write access between Windows and OSX at near native speed either way. Pretty cool and you can't beat free!

But it doesn't sound like it'll make disc images, does it? I frankly couldn't give a shit about backing up my files, as I have them stored on at least 2 drives and the important ones also have off-site backups. What I do NOT want to have to do is spend hours reinstalling and setting everything back up the way i like it.

I have been using a really nice software from Paragon* that does pretty much anything you'd want to do with a disk, along with the Windows 7 built in disk imaging, so I've been having good luck so far in that regard, but the LAST thing I want is to have my images borked by some new sector size BS. Not to mention i dual boot XP and Win7 so i have no idea if having both XP and 7 on the same drive will cause problems. Does anybody know if using the WD XP tool will slow down or Bork Win7?

*-For those that don't want to pay the $35, which it is WELL WORTH BTW, you can keep an eye out on Giveaway of the day as Paragon is really good about placing their tools on there when a new version comes out. Between that and Primewares (great site, lousy name) and its excellent freeware only search engine you can pretty much completely outfit a new PC for zero $. But for disk imaging I've found you really can't go wrong with paragon. Really solid software IMHO.

That's kinda funny, as I have been using this install of XP Pro for years, and I must have a good 100+ programs on it, and yet when I just checked the firewall exceptions list the only things I found were the programs that had asked me. Are you sure that you aren't talking XP SP2? Because I noticed the firewall seems to have gotten better with SP3.

Now with SP2 I would occasionally find MSFT products that added themselves to the list, but since SP3 I haven't had any try that stunt and I install software pretty much all the time. New games, old games, trialware, when they have a good app at giveawayoftheday or when I need a freeware app to do a specific job I snatch one at Primewares(formerly freeware world team) and with all this software I haven't had a single exception to the firewall list. So unless there is a way to bypass the firewall completely or it only happens with a few third party apps I just haven't seen it. And my machines are admin so if it was going to happen surely it would happen to me. Maybe it is just Photoshop?

I have to second or third or 500-th Wesnoth. Great RPG/strategy game. Frozen Bubble is great for those times when you really don't want to do anything else. I would check out http://game.giveawayoftheday.com/ also for great free games. I would recommend puzzle, word, RPG, and strategy games for children/teens. No need to actually offer FPS's to them; I am sure they will get them themselves if they want to play those.

game.giveawayoftheday.com is hit or miss but today its hit and it relates to the subject of space shooters.

They've got a game available today called Space Interceptor that is actually pretty cool. It is reminiscent of Colony Wars on the Playstation.

The only trick is you have to download it and install it today(July 20, 2007) as that is the whole shtick: a free game per day.

Here's a review of it:
http://pc.ign.com/articles/567/567710p1.html

Here's where to get the game
http://game.giveawayoftheday.com/space-interceptor /